Labour’s leader may be reviled, but David Cameron’s arrogance is to blame for
the botched Syria vote

The children’s party game, Pin the Tail on the Donkey, involves blindfolded contestants trying to impale their target. Westminster is currently engaged in a similar pursuit. It is called Pin the Blame on Ed Miliband, and anyone can play. Recent contestants include members of his own side, such as Lords Prescott and Glasman; those voters who have never warmed to him; and, naturally, the Tory leadership.

Even before the Syrian crisis, this axis of invective prompted the question: is Ed Miliband the most disliked leader in recent British history? No-hopers ranging from Michael Foot to Iain Duncan Smith failed to attract such odium, while the loathing directed at Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair was always balanced out by worship. Even Gordon Brown had an Eeyoreish quality that could pass as endearing.

Ed Miliband, by contrast, is attacked from all sides. As Labour critics worry that his policies are imprecise and his vision hazy, David Cameron has seized on his opponent’s failure to project a clear public image, painting him as weak. Such objections are minor, however, compared with the widespread wrath unleashed by Labour’s role in blocking any chance of military action in Syria.

If Barack Obama loses his vote in Congress, Mr Miliband will allegedly “own” whatever disaster befalls the Middle East. If chemical weapons treaties are effectively destroyed, it will be he who has supposedly cranked up the shredder. So hyperbolic is this charge sheet that it is possible to imagine that Mr Miliband is also to blame for the global water crisis, the potential extinction of the greater bamboo lemur and the exorbitant transfer fee paid by Real Madrid for Gareth Bale.

Even allowing for the Syrian debacle, the general venom directed at Mr Miliband is unjustified: he is a modest, thoughtful, clever and principled leader who has deftly rebuilt a broken party. And yet, on Syria, Mr Miliband has stumbled. Despite his proper and necessary aim of curbing David Cameron’s intemperance, the Labour leader blinked too soon.

Last Wednesday night, a text message went out to Labour MPs, telling them that Mr Miliband had successfully amended Mr Cameron’s motion. This, in their view, was the signal that they should vote with the Government. On Thursday morning, hours before the debate began, the Miliband camp heard that the Tories were telling journalists that the motion would, “in principle”, back military action.

And so the leadership whipped MPs to vote against it, to the dismay of many. “A bit of briefing should not be enough to alter the strategic direction of the country,” says one leading figure who finally voted “with heavy heart” against a proposal which Labour still expected the Government to win. Another senior Labour MP believes that Mr Miliband was “as gobsmacked as me” when the PM lost his Commons vote and pledged no further action.

Since then, disquiet has deepened. At Monday’s meeting of the parliamentary party, many MPs were disturbed that Mr Miliband appeared to be hardening his position by indicating Labour would only ever support military action if al-Qaeda procured large amounts of chemical weapons or national security was at stake. The shadow foreign secretary’s list of conditions, which did not explicitly include humanitarian catastrophe, was said by one MP to contain “a huge, gaping hole”.

When the head of the UN Refugee Commission calls the conflict “the calamity of the century”, then Mr Miliband, inured to ranters and egg-throwers, should heed the quiet voices. The four abstainers in last week’s vote, and others expressing unease, are not rent-a-rebels but reflective naysayers whose consciences forbade their acquiescence. As one dissenter told me: “This has been a bloody awful week for all of us.” While the leader and some close advisers agonise, more doubts emerge. As Ben Bradshaw MP rightly asks: why was the Joint Intelligence Committee report put before Parliament so threadbare in comparison with the US evidence of President Assad’s guilt?

Labour dissenters are none the less furious that Mr Miliband is being held responsible for the intemperance, the arrogance, the appalling judgment and the inability to add up that lost David Cameron his party’s backing. If Assad gets the all-clear for mass extermination, if weapons treaties are nullified and if policymakers are reduced to mouthing platitudes about diplomacy or weeping in front of their TV sets at the sight of children seared by a butcher’s napalm, then Mr Cameron must shoulder Britain’s guilt.

Blaming Mr Miliband serves, ironically, to bestow upon him the very power that his enemies claim he lacks. The country is crying out for statesmanship, and the Labour leader will have no better chance to silence his critics. Much as he might prefer to focus on British living standards, voters may judge the calibre of their leaders by what they have to offer the Syrian refugees fleeing with nothing and bound for nowhere. Both Mr Cameron and Mr Miliband are self-professed upholders of public virtue, explicitly committed to creating a better society. No wonder that the public, detecting a whiff of double standards, reviles the political classes.

The US president may lose his vote (though leading Milibandites think he will win) and France’s parliamentary debate, held today, may leave François Hollande isolated. Conversely, any strike may unleash the horrors threatened by Assad. But British leaders, who have no way of knowing any of this, should – in their own interests if not those of common humanity – leave the way open to a second vote.

Britain’s foreign policy, like all Mr Cameron’s problems, is Mr Miliband’s inheritance. Downing Street’s fury at the Opposition leader’s vacillation may have lacked the elegance of Lloyd George’s assessment of Neville Chamberlain as “a retail mind in a wholesale business”, but Tory expletives betrayed something other than Bullingdon-grade abuse.

A former insider at No 10 likens the outburst to Mr Brown’s camp denouncing the first sign of dissatisfaction by David Miliband as a traitor’s handiwork. “It’s the moment when the centre loses control,” says this source. “There are parallels between Cameron now and Gordon before the economic crisis. What is he for? What does he want to achieve?”

What indeed? With the polls still clear that Mr Miliband will be the next prime minister, the writing is surely on the wall for the rootless Mr Cameron, unless the dismissal notice is inscribed in the shaky hand of a paralysed Opposition leader. While most voters don’t want British involvement in Syria’s war (unsurprisingly, when the Government made its case so dismally), no leader should ever forget that 74 per cent of voters once backed Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech.

Mr Miliband, engulfed in rivers of bile, could be forgiven for refusing to change his mind, except that the uncertainties of this century demand the willingness always to think again. There is, as yet, no right course of action on Syria – only the unknowability and unlimited potential for regret charted by TS Eliot in “Burnt Norton”: Footfalls echo in the memory/ Down the passage which we did not take/ Towards the door we never opened/ Into the rose-garden.

The fact that Syria offers no rose garden, now or perhaps ever, to its tortured citizens is no reason to barricade the door.